Had Rabbi Kook’s model of the rabbinate come into being, Israeli society and world Judaism would have been dramatically transformed.

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As we brace ourselves for today’s Chief Rabbinate election, it is worth
remembering the words of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, the founding father
of the Chief Rabbinate. In the spring of 1921, in a speech in Jerusalem on the
founding of the Chief Rabbinate in what was then Mandate Palestine, Kook
lamented the sorrowful lack of respect many Jews felt for the rabbinic
establishment.

Infighting among Jewish sects from hassidim and mitnagdim
to Zionists and maskilim was, for Kook, intimately connected with the
deterioration of the rabbinate.

Instead of rising above the petty
bickering and serving as a unifying force, rabbis and the rabbinic establishment
had been dragged into the fray and sullied in the process.

Kook the
visionary, who died in 1935, rightly foresaw that the burgeoning Jewish
community in Palestine would serve as the basis for the reestablishment of
Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. He hoped to “invigorate the
rabbinate’s spiritual essence” and transform the rabbinate into an “an
organizing force,” a force that informs and influences “the entire national
rebuilding process” from law and economics to literature and
art.

Unfortunately, Kook’s hope never materialized.

More worrying,
Kook’s criticism of his own generation has not lost it relevancy. The rabbinate
remains in the hands of individuals of a “special type” and who are captive to
“special factions,” as Kook euphemistically put it 92 years ago. We would put it
more bluntly: The rabbinate has become an instrument manipulated by rabbis
representing narrow interests to leverage the power and influence of their
allies and cronies and to bash opposition.

One faction or another lucky
enough to gain control over the Chief Rabbinate has repeatedly exploited its
state-backed monopoly over kashrut supervision, marriage registration, and the
building of synagogues and ritual baths to benefit their cohorts and to take
revenge against the outgoing faction that did the same in the previous term.
National religious fight with Shas and the Ashkenazi haredim and each of these
groups has subgroups that quarrel among themselves.

This often vicious
infighting was on embarrassing display in recent months as the races for chief
Ashkenazi rabbi and chief Sephardi rabbi heated up.

What is more, in
stark contrast to Kook’s vision, the rabbinate has increasingly restricted its
interests to the narrow confines of religious law as it developed in the
Diaspora in pre-modern times.

Not since such rabbinic luminaries as Isaac
Halevi Herzog, the first chief Ashkenazi rabbi after the establishment of the
state, or Shlomo Goren, the third chief Ashkenazi, has serious thought been
devoted to grappling with the unique religious and spiritual challenges of
running a Jewish state in the Land of Israel in modern times. What does Judaism
have to say about diplomacy? What does it say about the rights of minorities
living in a Jewish state? About the way a Jewish economy should be run? Of
course, none of these issues can be addressed until Orthodoxy also develops a
more sophisticated approach to the tremendous sociological upheaval since the
19th century that led to the creation of the “secular Jew.”

Millions of
Jews – both in Israel and abroad – retain a Jewish identity that is devoid of
any halachic dimension but which is no less profound than the identity
proclaimed and practiced by the most pious Jew. As long as the Chief Rabbinate
disregards, minimizes or trivializes this majority as nothing more than a bunch
of “captive infants,” suffering from false consciousness, it can never hope to
be relevant in any significant way for the entirety of the Jewish
people.

Understandably, the vast majority of Israelis feel that the
rabbinate has absolutely no relevance, except when one is forced to interact
with the religious bureaucracy that monopolizes marriage registration, divorce,
burial and kashrut supervision. Too often such interaction is a bad experience,
particularly when the mind-numbing inefficiencies inherent in any state-run
bureaucracy are combined with a holier-than-thou condescension affected by the
religious functionaries toward those unfortunate “captive infants” they must
serve.

Had Rabbi Kook’s model of the rabbinate come into being, Israeli
society and world Judaism would have been dramatically transformed.
Unfortunately, that did not happen. Recognizing this is the first step toward
fixing this sorry state of affairs. We hope that at least a modest step will be
taken toward such a tikkun olam by the two newly elected chief rabbis.

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